Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Silencing the Albrecht

Since writing about the Albrecht AE2990AFS 10m multimode handheld, where I wrote: "There is an annoying beep at every button press, but this can easily be silenced" I have received several emails asking "How?" The answer is in the manual, on page 25, under "Other Functions: Beep Tone and Roger Beep" which is how I found out how to do it.

To save any further questions, here's how I did it. Press and hold the SCAN/M-SCN button for three seconds, then press it again. The display will show BP ON. Press the DOWN button and it will change to BP OF which is obviously short for BEEP OFF. There is a musical note icon on the LCD that appears when the beep tone is on. The roger beep is activated / disabled in the same way if you press SCAN/M-SCN twice after the initial long press. There is another icon of two musical notes to show when that is on. Easy, isn't it?

Actually there's no need to hold SCAN/M-SCN for as long as three seconds, only until the display changes to SH. This doesn't seem to be mentioned in the manual at all but it is clearly where you set the amount of shift used when the "+" and "-" shift functions are invoked to work through a repeater (repeater shift is enabled by pressing FUNC followed by STEP/CH.FR, but it only works in the ham band modes.) On mine, the shift was set to 600kHz so you need to dial it down to 100 for 10m repeater use. It's a pity the radio doesn't support selectable CTCSS repeater access tones since most 10m repeaters in Europe use something other than the provided 88.5Hz access tone.

I suppose it is possible that this function is not available in similar radios to the Albrecht sold under other names. It appears to be the case that other radios don't possess the ability to switch between 10m and 12m by pressing the CH 9/19 button.